The dead hand of central government is weighing down on children and schools

Soon it won't matter which school you 'choose'. The same factory line will follow, as the accountability structure constrains schools' ability to be creative or different, says
Fiona Millar

Fiona Millar: 'Schools need to be as good and rigorous as possible, but I also know my own children's wider education was down to something beyond that which can be easily measured.' Photograph: Garry Weaser for the Guardian
Garry Weaser/Guardian

Last month marked another milestone for me. Our last child did her last school exam. It is the end of an era for us and on balance I am glad our children grew up in the last 20 years rather than the next.

The first one started school in 1992. "Choice" was in its infancy. We didn't look at any schools beyond those that were geographically closest to where we lived and have never regretted that. Our children have always walked to school; one has never worn a uniform. They have achieved well, but their education has extended way beyond test and exam results because of the values of their schools, the relationships they made and the children they have been educated alongside.

Despite the public rhetoric of those two decades, choice for most parents has narrowed. One of the greatest myths perpetuated by "reformers" about the English school system is that it has been too weighed down by the dead hand of uniformity.

In fact, the reverse is true. English schools have always been diverse (and unequal), embracing an abundance of private, selective, non-selective, faith, non-denominational, single-sex and co-educational schools with different atmospheres and outlooks.

A few more school types may have been invented, but now it is the dead hand of central government, league tables, Ofsted and the four or five data sets that determine institutional success that weigh heavily on all children.

Want your children to enjoy an early education dominated by creativity and play? Forget it. A secondary school without a uniform? No chance. Education for education's sake? Dream on.

Soon it won't really matter which school you "choose". The same factory line will follow, as the accountability structure, designed honourably to help schools improve, increasingly constrains their ability to be creative or different.

But perhaps the greatest paradox of choice is that parents seem more anxious than ever – caught between their desire to do their best for their children and the increasingly negative messages churned out by a secretary of state who appears to be taking a virtual world tour from his desk in Whitehall.

Once you only had to worry about what went on in the local school. Now you need to be an expert in at least four different foreign jurisdictions to understand what you might be choosing. One minute it was Sweden – home of the flat-pack school and children designing their own curricula; then it was downtown Harlem for the dawn-to-dusk boot camp approach. Last month, it was Singapore (with a bit of Kenya thrown in for good measure) in justification of a two-tier exam system.

And no matter which country we have landed in for the latest speech or press release, information is used in a selective and misleading way, making it even harder for parents to reach an informed judgment.

So Singapore apparently gets 80% of its pupils through O-levels. But does it? Actually only two thirds of a very small cohort take O-level so, in fact, a slightly lower proportion pass five O-levels than achieve five good GCSEs here.

Children are put into exam tracks at the end of primary school (the antithesis of parent choice) and even the Singaporeans are worried about the rigidity of their system, the self-esteem of the children in the lower streams and the excessive focus on exams over wider skills.

The American academic Dr Yong Zhao, a sceptic about the import of tiger economy education policies, ran a comparison between the Pisa maths tables and another international study, which ranked countries according to entrepreneurial spirit, with surprising and counterintuitive results. The countries with the stellar Pisa scores had the fewest people who were confident in their entrepreneurial skills. The poorer Pisa performers, like America, scored best.

America is the latest country to be riven by dissent over reforms to its traditionally more liberal, laid-back approach to schooling, but the dissenters are right to worry about the trade-off between high-stakes testing and creativity, individuality and wider skills for life.

I feel passionate about the need for all my local schools to be as good and rigorous as possible, but I also know my own children's wider education was down to something beyond that which can be easily measured. Parents, and pupils, should have the right to choose those other intangible, but equally important, qualities as well.